


Second Hand Love

by crookedlystacked



Category: The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Gen, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 06:19:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16057292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedlystacked/pseuds/crookedlystacked
Summary: When Fran shows up at her door two days after Larry leaves for Vegas, she conversationally informs Lucy that she's decided they should come to live with her, to keep her company and help her out of her chair when she has to pee because she can hardly see her feet anymore.Lucy's never been particularly great at being alone. She packs a bag.





	Second Hand Love

Lucy Swann has never been anyone's first choice. It's a fact she learned at a young age, learned as her own mother swatted her grasping hands away, told her sternly that she loved too much. It stuck, but try as she might, and lord how she tried, she couldn't turn it off. She loved too much, she clung too hard, but it was all she was good at. She was good at loving, in all the ways a woman can be good at loving, and she loved Larry Underwood fiercely and full hearted, but with a sense of resignation born from years of experience. 

-

She had loved Wes with all the inexperienced optimism of a high school girl getting her first taste of the way it felt when someone's eyes ran over you with intent, when someone's hands undressed you and touched you. She'd thrown herself head first into the pursuit of true love, storybook love, the kind of love she'd been spoon fed to expect since birth. She still remembers the sharp pain in her chest as she stood in the bathroom stall, a week away from graduation and the rest of her life, holding a positive pregnancy test while she listened to Gretchen Myers talk at length about how good Wes was with his hands. She'd had to bite her tongue until she tasted blood not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. 

The glass slipper cracked. The clock struck midnight. She loved too much.

Wes had done the right thing, and Lucy had smiled and nodded and shut off a little piece of her heart while all along telling herself it was okay, they were young, things would be different once they were married, once the baby was there. In her darker moments, she used to wonder what would have happened if maybe she'd listened to her parents. If she'd gone off and had the baby and given her up and never seen Wes again, but she hadn't. She'd said yes and gotten married with the weight of their baby feeling like an anchor in her belly. The anchor had come back as she'd buried Wes in the backyard with Marcy in his arms, and she had thought suddenly and inappropriately of Snow White in her glass coffin, coming back to life with true love's kiss. It was a real shame, she'd thought, that they'd never had true love.

It wasn't all bad. It had been okay. It had been worth it, for Marcy. Finally, Lucy had someone to soak up all the love she could give, her perfect little girl with blue eyes and baby soft curls. She'd spend hours just holding her, staring at her tiny pink face and picturing what she'd look like when she grew up. She'd picture throwing her birthday parties and helping her pick a prom dress, a wedding dress, a whole life full of a daughter who would know every day that she was loved, a daughter whose grasping hands would always find something to hold on to. 

She had buried them together on a Wednesday. A lot of that time runs together in her mind, just a seemingly never ending cycle of sickness and fear and Marcy's helpless cries, but she'll always remember that it was a Wednesday. Marcy was dressed only in underwear covered in smiling suns that happily proclaimed in bubble letters that it was Monday. She had tried, but she was unable to stand the thought of dressing her in pink ruffles or white lace that would hug her swollen, purple body. A future's worth of dreams and love put into a hole in the ground, and as she'd thrown the final shovel of dirt over the both of them she had to swallow down the bile rising in her throat. 

She'd sung a shaky rendition of You Are My Sunshine for Marcy, and spared a silent thought for Wes. He'd tried his best every now and then. He was a good father. He loved Marcy with all he had, and it was a small comfort that they were together in that shallow hole, at least.

-

She'd been in a haze of grief for days, and once she could no longer stand sitting in her house surrounded by their memories she had started walking aimlessly. She was almost at the edge of town with no real plan and terribly aching feet when she came upon them. She'd seen Leo first. Well, Joe, at the time, but she'd seen him first and she'd thought she was hallucinating. That he was there as some kind of sick phantom because her own broken heart wouldn't let her picture Marcy as alive anymore. Then he'd talked, and she'd realized there were other people. Larry, and Nadine, and she'd wanted to fall at their feet. People, alive people, warm and real and right in front of her and if her eyes lingered a little too long on the square angle of Larry's jaw, well, she could always write that off as a momentary lapse of her grieving brain.

But, like always, she just couldn't help herself. She loves too much. Oh, she's not a fool, she had been very aware of Larry's feelings for Nadine, and she may not have fully understood just how or why or what it was between them, but she didn't exactly protest when Larry started laying his sleeping bag next to hers at night. What had started as a need to connect, a need to feel again, a need to cling tight to someone who may not have loved her but certainly didn't mean any ill intent by it, had slowly turned into more. She wasn't surprised. She knew herself and she came to know Larry, and once again she was someone's second choice, but he loved her as well as he could. 

There were times when it was almost enough. When he wrapped a blanket around her shoulders at night and brushed her hair back from her face in the morning and when the sun glinted off his face while he played guitar. The sharp pain of loss she used to feel when she watched him with Leo even faded into a dull ache.

It was just her luck. Nadine had left and maybe she had only gotten Larry's heart because it was broken and she was there to hold it together, but she still had it in her hands. She had Larry, and Leo, and she was just starting to feel like even if it took a plague to get there, maybe things were going to work out.

Then Mother Abigail sent him West, and Larry, well. Larry kissed her goodbye and he went. 

-

She loves too much. She misses Larry so much it aches, hovers over Leo as he sleeps, places her palm over his chest to make sure he's breathing and forces down flashes of Marcy's mottled face. When Fran shows up at her door two days after Larry leaves for Vegas, she conversationally informs Lucy that she's decided they should come to live with her, to keep her company and help her out of her chair when she has to pee because she can hardly see her feet anymore.

Lucy's never been particularly great at being alone. She packs a bag.

Fran is stubbornly optimistic, and it would rub Lucy raw if she didn't see through it, see the frayed and terrified girl behind the bravado. So when she wakes up to Fran's whimpers three days later Lucy doesn't give a second thought to crawling into her bed, petting her hair away from her face and muttering soft nonsense at her until Fran blinks her eyes open and sleepily turns to face her. Lucy slips further down into Stu's side of the bed and lets Fran's grasping hands find her own, lets herself be someone else's second choice. 

It's not all bad. She's desperately lonely herself, scared and hopeless and Frannie needs her. Needs somebody. As much as Lucy's feeling, she figures Fran must be feeling it worse. She's pregnant, after all, with all the normal fears compounded by the flu and a wayward man and no way of knowing if there's going to be a tomorrow to hope for. She thinks of pink ruffles, of white lace, of purple skin, and rests a hand on Frannie's swollen stomach that night in bed. 

-

"Was it exciting?" Fran asks in the dark a few days later.

"Was what?" Lucy answers sleepily, petting carefully at Fran's belly. The baby's started to kick, just little flutters that don't even wake Fran up, but sometimes Lucy feels them against her hand at night. She doesn't sleep much. 

"Being pregnant. Having a baby. Back when all that stuff was normal, I mean. I had just started thinking about it when things got bad. About baby showers and names and little tiny shoes. I always loved the thought of those little tiny shoes," she mutters sleepily.

"Those things got lost the second you brought them home," she answers, and for the first time she finds herself thinking of Marcy and smiling. "Marcy kicked them off in seconds. When she got old enough, she threw them too. They're little, but they still hurt when they hit you at close range."

"Still," Fran says, her voice wistful. "Would've been nice, to do it right. To get to do it at all. God, I still don't know if I'll get to do it at all," her voice cracks and she turns under Lucy's arm, resting her head on Lucy's chest and crying until Lucy can feel warm tears spreading through the thin material of her shirt.

"You don't know," she says, petting Fran's hair and smoothing her tears away with her thumbs, leftover maternal instincts that feel vaguely wrong at the moment. "It could all be okay, Frannie. The baby's half you."

"Yeah," Fran says, her voice turning a different kind of sad that Lucy's not used to from her. "All of me was never enough for most things. Now I'm laying my hopes on half."

"I like all of you," Lucy says quietly without meaning to, the pain of grasping hands never meeting their mark blooming tight in her chest, but it's worth it when Fran turns her face up and gives Lucy a watery smile and a kiss on the cheek.

-

The next day, she takes Fran shopping at a baby boutique that's been untouched for all the obvious reasons. They stop a few feet away and Leo makes Fran cover her eyes as Lucy knocks out the window with a rock and opens the door, Leo leading Frannie carefully around broken glass and then immediately beelining for a stuffed bear bigger than either of them. He throws himself at it full force and grunts when he skids across the floor on top of it.

Frannie opens her eyes at the commotion and Lucy watches as she pushes the initial fear and sadness down, watches as her eyes flit to a row of impossibly tiny booties in every color imaginable. Lucy picks up a basket and sweeps one of each into it, grinning back at Fran when she finally starts to smile. 

They take one of pretty much everything and Lucy goes back for the godawful, stupid giant teddy bear when Fran and Leo both fall asleep as soon as they get home. She has to find a dolly to manage to get it home without just dragging it behind her, but the look on Leo's face after he wakes up face to face with it and yelps is worth it, and so is the way Frannie smiles at her, warm and happy and maybe for a moment not so alone. 

Still. Lucy loves too much. She reminds herself over and over, like a mantra, every time she finds herself wanting to fall into old habits. Fran's leg winding between hers as she sleeps. Fran kissing her cheek in thanks when she rubs her sore back. Fran smiling, backlit in front of the kitchen window, one of Stu's shirts stretched too tight around her pregnant belly and wiping sleep out of her eyes as she pretends to be excited about the oatmeal and bacon bits that passes for breakfast. 

-

She wakes up to Fran's breath hot against her throat and Fran's arm jostling her own as it moves between her legs. She's asleep, Lucy is pretty sure, but when she moves to leave the bed Fran's free hand grabs her arm in a vice grip. 

"Stay," she whispers, her voice cracking around a harsh exhale. "If you want, I want you to, to stay, I'm-"

Lucy remembers. Remembers her third trimester and the sudden, desperate need for Wes that she had mostly satisfied with her own hand to avoid smelling other women's perfume waft up as she moved on top of him. 

She gets back in bed. She replaces Fran's hand with her own, holds onto her as she moans and pants and works herself on Lucy's fingers until she shudders and sinks into the mattress. She bites her own lips raw in an effort to keep them to herself. 

She loves too much. She's second choice.

The next morning, she wakes up with a familiar lurch in her stomach and runs for the toilet. She rests a shaking hand against her flat stomach and knows, suddenly and certainly, that Larry is never coming home.

-

She keeps it to herself until Fran finds her two weeks later, huddled miserably over the toilet.

"Well," Fran says dryly. "Here I thought we were being careful."

Lucy laughs, loud and braying and completely unintentional, laughs so hard she starts to cry, and only stops when Frannie tries to sit next to her on the floor.

"Don't," she says. "I'll just have to hoist you back up and if I throw out my back then where will we be?"

"We still have Leo," Fran says, ignoring her and sinking slowly down the wall until she's pressed against Lucy's side. "And that dolly." 

She laughs again, she can't help herself, and she sinks into Frannie's side and under the arm she offers.

"Larry's dead," she says matter-of-factly once she can speak at all. "I don't know how I know, but I know. I have all that's left of him."

"You can't know that," Fran says stiffly, her hand tightening on Lucy's arm. "You can't. Stu promised, he promised he'd come back so you can't know-"

Lucy's heart, her stupid, ignorant heart that never seems to learn, clenches painfully in her chest. 

"Larry didn't," Lucy says, cutting her off and being very, very careful to keep her voice normal. "He didn't promise. I think he knew. I think we both knew. Didn't count on this," she says, putting her hand to her stomach, "but I think we both knew."

"Lucy-"

"It's okay," she says, wiping harshly at her eyes. "It's okay. I had him for his best parts, I think. He didn't talk about it a lot, but I could tell. He wasn't the same man I met by the time he left. He was better. Not perfect, but better. I was there for that. I was a part of it." She doesn't know which of them she's trying to comfort, but it seems to work on both of them. 

"Come on," she says, rising to her feet and then hauling Frannie up. "Let's see what's left at that store."

-

That night, Lucy wakes up crying from a dream where Larry's standing in that hastily dug hole in her backyard, standing with Marcy's body in his outstretched arms, and Frannie holds her, strokes her hair, kisses her forehead and her cheek and the tears from her eyes and then her mouth, finally her mouth, and Lucy closes her eyes and kisses back and does her best not to hold on too tight.

The next day, Frannie goes into labor.

-

They camp out in Frannie's hospital room and take turns distracting her until they all agree that Leo's much better at it and Lucy mostly contents herself with holding Fran's hand, stroking back her sweaty hair, getting her ice chips and trying not to let her own fear show.

The baby is born sick. He takes his very first breath and then coughs on his second, and Lucy watches all the light in Frannie's brown eyes go out. She tries to speak but can't think of what to say. What do you say? _I buried my kid, Fran, it's not so bad after a while. If you try real hard you can almost forget it ever happened, until you see blue eyes or golden curls._ In the end, she just holds on tighter and she wipes Fran's forehead and she loves too much. Always too much.

-

Frannie finally falls asleep after she lets George talk her into some chemical assistance, and Lucy returns home. It's not really her home. It's Fran's, and Stu's, but she returns anyway and cleans until it shines and carefully packs away all the things they'd gotten for the baby into boxes and takes a last look into the nursery. The stupid, giant bear sits in the corner, a gift from Leo and one of great sacrifice, its button eyes glinting in the dark. She closes the door, swallows down every single feeling rising in her throat, and heads back to the hospital to find Frannie asleep, curled around Stu Redman in a hospital bed too narrow for the task. His eyes blink open, and he smiles sadly when he sees her. "Lucy," he whispers. "C'mere."

She's rooted to the spot. She can't move. She loves too much.

"Tell me."

"Lucy, he-"

"I know," she says, possibly too harshly. "I know," she repeats, softer this time, her hand seemingly magnetized to her stomach. 

"I'm sorry, Lucy," Stu says, his eyes so warm and kind that she can't bring herself to think ill of him. He'd loved Larry too, in his way. The irony doesn't escape her.

"Lucy!" Frannie says suddenly, her eyes blinking open. "Lucy did you hear? Stu's back, and they think- they think Peter's going to be okay, Luce."

Lucy nods, smiles, chokes on whatever words were trying to come out of her throat, and turns on her heel. 

-

She goes back to the house. She unpacks the boxes of baby clothes, lines all ten pair of tiny shoes on the changing table, and packs her and Leo's things in the empty boxes and then she carefully makes the bed she shared with Frannie for the past few months. She takes a deep breath and a last look and then she erases every wrinkle and stray hair and bobby pin trace of herself. 

-

Leo is sitting on the stoop of their house when she walks up, the dolly's wheels scraping the pavement behind her. He's throwing a tennis ball for Kojak while Tom Cullen snores on the porch swing. 

"Hey kid," she says. "What are you doing here?"

"Stu's back," he says with shrug. "Larry's not. Is he dead?"

"Yes," she says. It doesn't do any good to lie to Leo.

"Thought so, for a while," Leo says, ruffling Kojak's ears. "Had a dream. He said he loved us and to take care of you and Fran and the babies. There was a boom. Big one." 

Lucy can't quite bring herself to respond, even if she knew what to say. Kojak whines and drops his ball, walks over and snuffles at her hand until she pets his head. 

"Kojak's real name is Big Steve," Leo says absently. "Did you know?"

"No," she says, dropping to sit next to him on the stoop. "I think you're the only one who knows that." Leo nods. He seems to be the only one who knows a lot of things, and Lucy's heart is overcome with a sudden rush of love for him. She's not even his second choice. More like fourth, really, but here he is, putting his hand to her stomach and cocking his head in turn with Kojak, like they're listening to something she can't hear. Maybe they are. 

She loves too much, she thinks again as she rests her head on Leo's shoulder and her hand over his on her belly. For the first time in awhile, though, the thought makes her smile.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first time I've ever written anything that didn't already have a tag on AO3. Sometimes you've got to steer the ship yourself, especially when you're the only passenger. I figured I'd stop letting this fester in my google docs just in case there's a lifeboat out there waiting for it. This metaphor is falling apart.


End file.
